Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street: The Print Culture of a Victorian Street

Abstract

Mary Shannon’s title heralds an intriguing discovery: ‘This book reveals, for the first time, that Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew all had offices on the same London street’ (p. 3). The revelation creates expectations which are not fulfilled in a narrowly biographical sense, but which, through its broader scope and purpose, the book far exceeds. Shannon cites familiar evidence of mutual hostility between Dickens and Reynolds, mainly to illustrate how rivalries can function within social networks. She notes the lack of communication between Dickens and Mayhew after 1845, but sheds no fresh light on this estrangement of two writers whose representations of London street life have always suggested a close affinity. Biography is of only minor concern in a book arguing that mid-nineteenth-century Wellington Street constituted ‘a remarkably interconnected community, made up of interlocking networks’ (p. 3). Shannon develops this case in several ways: through meticulous investigation of street directories; through identification of numerous other writers (Sala, Jerrold, Forster, Lewes, Dilke) and journals (Athenaeum, Punch, Puppet Show) in or near Wellington Street with links to the three principals and their publications; and through an alertness to the close relationships at that time between print, illustrative art work, and theatre (the Lyceum was, and is, situated in Wellington Street). This is a book which certainly ‘contributes to the interdisciplinary field of nineteenth-century print culture’ (p. 4), its argument shaped by, for example, network studies, spatial and agglomeration theories, gender and body studies, and a recent emphasis in urban studies on ‘everyday practice’ (p. 17). In this and other respects, Shannon follows the ‘New Agenda, Urban Mobility: New Maps of Victorian London’ announced by Katharina Boehm and Josephine McDonagh in this journal;1 she reiterates, for example, their critique of the role of the flaneur, a mobile spectator who typically froze the scene before him into immobility (p. 11). This is a questionable proposition given that, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, observers of street life identified incessant, tumultuous movement and rapid shifts of action and atmosphere as its most salient characteristics. Indeed, Shannon herself adopts the classic structural device of urban documentary, expressive of diurnal flux, in arranging her study into chapters covering ‘the four times of day’. It is a plan admirably suited to her distinctive purposes.

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